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Wohlfarth, No-Mans-Land - On Walter Benjamin Destructive Character
Wohlfarth, No-Mans-Land - On Walter Benjamin Destructive Character
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Diacritics.
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Walter Benjamin has long been frozen in this country as a hot tip. More translation
cannot by itself remedy this situation. Sustained mediation is required if his concep-
tion of criticism as "quoting out of context" is not to be unwittingly parodied. The
following essay tries, by way of a telescopic microscopie, to show what reading
Benjamin involves. In necessarily programmatic fashion it situates a crucial "middle"
text within contexts and problematics that anticipate our own. Positive negativity,
non-Hegelian dialectics, the transvaluation of allegory, the undoing of "man," "the
subject," "depth"-these are also the independent concern of much contemporary
thinking, especially in France. My reading has in part been guided by such latent
parallels (and divergences). They could not be mapped out here. Nor was there
room to discuss the growing secondary literature. My implicit claim is, however, that
Benjamin is also to be located between its entrenchments. Least of all can his posi-
tion be reduced to "nostalgia" [Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton Univ.
Press, 1971), pp. 60-83].
1. The constellation
"Where is my place of work? In Berlin W[est]. [...] But do you really mean to
forbid me [...] at my little writing-factory from hanging the red flag out of the
window on the grounds that it's nothing but a scrap of rag? Given the 'counter-
revolutionary' nature of one's work-as you quite correctly characterize mine from a
party standpoint-should one do the counter-revolution the further favor of
explicitly placing oneself at its disposal? Shouldn't one rather methylate one's work,
like spirits, to guarantee its unpalatability to the other side-at the risk of making it
unpalatable to everyone?" [Br, 531]. Thus Walter Benjamin, a "prisoner of [Berlin]
West" [GS, 4, 1, 287]-a middle-class neighborhood-on his socio-literary situation
in April, 1931. The immediate occasion for this gesture of self-vindication had been
the sharp response of his friend Scholem to his essay on KarlKraus, which Benjamin
had described as addressing the relation between the "fundamentally metaphysical
orientation" of his research and his "application of the materialist approach" [Br,
' The original text is in Gesammelte Schriften. ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser
[Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971- ], 4, 1, pp. 396-98. Reference will also be made to the first draft [4,
2, pp. 999-1001]. Quotations are taken, where possible, from existing English translations; these
are, where necessary, emended. For references in the text, abbreviations, followed immediately
by the appropriate page numbers, will be used: GS for Gesammelte Schriften; Br for Briefe
[Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1966]; ili for Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1968]; UB for Understanding Brecht [London: New Left Books, 1973]; CB for Charles
Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Eraof High Capitalism [London: New Left Books, 1973]; 0 for The
Origin of German Tragic Drama [London: New Left Books, 1977].
48
2 As a characterin a
pre-psychological sense, the destructive characteris proof against the
avenging reversals familiarto us from dialectics and psychoanalysis. His destruction does not
take its toll on him. True,he does, in simplifyingthe world,also simplifyhimself; but his actions
do not returnto plague the inventor. On the contrary,they liquidate mythicalguilt.
50
3 "Thisis the freedom of the void [. . .] the fanaticismof destruction[.. ..] the elimination of
individualswho are objects of suspicion to any social order, and the annihilationof any organi-
zation which tries to rise anew from the ruins. Only in destroying something does this negative
will possess the feeling of itself as existent" [G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophyof Right,tr. T. M. Knox
(London:OxfordUniv. Press:1942),p. 18]. It is no accident that a philosophy of the state should
choose the reign of terroras a paradigmaticexample of "abstractnegation." Undialectical
destruction can then be condemned as a voluntaristthreat to the social order. The destructive
character,on the other hand, is likened to a "destructivestate institution." If he momentarily
savors a certain "freedom of the void," then not for purposes of self-confirmation.Hegel too
has a psychological theory of the destructive character.The destruction that Benjamin often
equates with dialectics in fact distinguishes his thought from dialectical models. Jacques Der-
ridahas shown how in Hegel's master-slavedialectic a contest between the mastersis evaded in
the interests of the slavish reproduction of the philosophical economy. Cf. "De I'6conomie
restreintea I'6conomie g6n6rale" in L'Ecritureet la Diff6rence[Paris:Seuil, 1967,pp. 369-407].
The destruction that threatens to interruptdialecticalmovement is suppressed by the destruc-
tion that is its motor. Likewise,Benjamin's"dialecticsat a standstill"[CB, 171]is, "fora moment
at least," the standstillof the dialectic that makes the worldgo round. Whichposes the question
of the relationship between Benjaminiandestruction and Derrideandeconstruction ...
diacritics/June 1978 53
54
Benjamin saw in pacifism no alternative to the cult of war but only its mirror
image. His own Critique of Violence (1921) was a theory of the "divine" counter-
violence capable of "arresting" the continuity of "mythical" violence [GS, 2, 1, 199].
He rediscovered it in Georges Sorel's conception of a proletarian general strike
which would aim not at political and economic blackmail but at the "suspension of
law" and the "demolition of the state" [202, 194]. As a "pure means" such action
would, regardless of its possibly catastrophic consequences, be "non-violent"; the
state, however, brands such action as violence pure and simple [ibid.]. Awareness
that the state and its laws were founded on revolutionary violence [rechtsetzende
Gewalt] was, Benjamin argued, eroded by the latter's transformation into a law-and-
order conservatism [rechtserhaltende Gewalt] which legitimized the suppression of
subsequent revolutionary subversion merely by identifying it as violence. Modern
parliaments thus exhibited a weakened "sense of the constitutive violence vested in
them" [190, 202]. Unscientific though Benjamin's political analysis may have seemed,
it was uncannily accurate. In the Weimar Republic liberal democracy and ideology
were to prove no match for fascist violence. "While he spoke," Benjamin noted in
1938 after a political discussion with Brecht in Denmark, "I felt the impact of powers
equal to those of fascism," powers that "sprang from depths of history no less deep
than fascist power" [UB, 120]. The destructive character can take on the dark forces
of latter-day, "enlightened" myth only because his own force goes equally deep. It is
a matching combination, at once modern surface and archaic depth, "signal" and
"oracle." Oracles do not, of course, abide by parliamentary procedures. To invoke
such "destructive state institutions" at the critical juncture when parliamentary
democracy was trying to preserve itself from destruction was to invite political mis-
understanding. Benjamin had invoked Sorel's rehabilitation of violence without feel-
diacritics/June 1978 55
sCf. his Afterword to Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus
[Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969], pp. 185ff. and his essay "Historischer Materialismus oder
politischer Messianismus?"in Materialienzu Benjamins Thesen 'iber den Begriff der Ges-
chichte' [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975], pp. 106ff.
6
Benjaminrefers explicitly to Brecht's"destructivecharacter,which puts everythingback in
question almost before it has been achieved" [UB, 119]. Cf. also his commentaryon the eighth
stanza of Of Poor B.B.: "Willsurvive of these cities what went through them: the wind! / The
banqueter is glad to empty the mansion. / We realizethat we arepurelyprovisional/ And afterus
will come--nothing worth mention" [56]. Reduced to his initials, B.B. is himself an interim
stage: "Thebest defender of a cause is one who has made a startby lettinggo of himself"[58].
diacritics/june 1978 57
"A fine phrase of Brecht'swill help us out, a long way out: 'Effacethe traces' "
[GS, 2, 1, 217]. For several years after visiting Moscow in 1927 Benjaminsaw Soviet
Russia as pointing the way out. "The new perspective one gains on [Berlin]," he
noted, "is the most unquestionable advantage of a stay in Russia"[GS, 4, 1, 316]. The
East-Westcomparison underlies a number of his subsequent writings; The Destruc-
tive Characteris also written in this margin. If it is in the "wretchedness of the
interior" [GS, 2, 1, 299] that the prisoner of Berlin West experiences the claus-
trophobia of bourgeois society, Russiafigures, conversely, as the answer to the need
for "fresh air," the Archimedean point from which the old world might be moved.
In his own thinking Benjamin seeks to initiate an equivalent process to this
"world-historicalexperiment" in social transformation[GS, 4, 1,330], experimentally
identifying it with the blank space in which solutions to the "antinomies" [UB, 89] of
bourgeois society could be worked out. Where familiarnotions "have almost disap-
peared from the face of the earth" [GS,, 2 2, 743], the anonymous effacement of
traces no longer connotes the social alienation that drives windowless bourgeois
monads back into their shells. The abolition of private property has been im-
plemented by "sealing off everything private to an unimaginable extent" [Br,439],
thereby clearing, for more than "a moment," a tabula rasa, the "empty space [...]
where the thing stood, the victim lived."9Everythought, every day and every life lie
here as on a laboratorytable. [. . .] On the shop-floor, in the houses and buildings,
employees, offices and furnitureare regrouped, transferredand shifted about" [GS,
4, 1, 325]. The furnishings inside Russian houses-which are "merely used as
camping-sites"-may only amount to a collection of "petty-bourgeois odds and
ends," but their weekly rearrangementconstitutes a "radicalmeans of riddingthe air
of 'snugness' [Gemutlichkeit]and its accompanying melancholy" [328]. In the West
Sundays mark a weekly rendez-vous with the spleen that Baudelairepictures as the
hopeless, angry jangle of chafing church-bells [CB, 144]. Moscow, on the other
hand, is "practicallyliberated from the chimes which on Sundays spread such pro-
found sadness over our large cities" [GS, 4, 1, 344]. The insides of overladen byzan-
tine churches have "not merely been cleared out but gutted like game" [346].
Is, then, the destructive characterthe Bolshevik'sWestern counterpartand vice
versa? "What distinguishes the Bolshevik [... ] from his Western comrades is his
state of utter preparedness. He manages on so little that he is, year in year out, ready
to give it up and start afresh. He would not otherwise be equal to the task" [326].
Inapplicablethough it is said to be to the Bolshevik'sWestern comrades, this charac-
terization also holds for the destructive character; conversely, the following sen-
tence might have been formulatedwith the Bolshevikin mind: "Whatmattersto him
are not private adventures but the permanent certainty of having a historicaljob to
do" [GS, 4, 2, 1000].The social arena as the essential dimension of existence, imper-
sonal relations incompatible with a bourgeois or feudal order, authoritarianwatch-
words, the futilityof suicide-these are among the motifs that recur in both contexts.
But every common trait pinpoints the vast divergence between them. "Being able to
insert one's ideas into a pre-given field of force; a mandate, however implicit it may
be; organized, guaranteed contact with one's comrades" [GS, 4, 1, 327]-these ad-
vantages are not available to the destructive character, who first has to gather
"people"-not "comrades"-around him and, significantly, receives his mandate
9 This phrase too is calculated to arouse political suspicions. But if the destructive character
clearsaway, he does not purge. Thereare victims, but no sacrifice. Otherwisedestructionwould
be still caught up in the toils of myth, which is "masteredneither by puritynor by sacrifice"[GS,
2, 1, 367].
diacritics/June 1978 61
Does the destructive character come to prepare the way for the Messiah, or is it
his job to destroy theology too? Convincing evidence exists for either alternative.
Scholem's reading of "profane illumination" places most weight on the noun; others
accentuate the predicate. Both are surely right only against the other. It was the
difficult, compelling tension-not the well-trodden alternative-between the posi-
tions to which Benjamin responded.
It was, he conceded in a late jotting, beyond his powers to eradicate all traces of
theology. "My thinking relates to theology like blotting-paper to ink. It is totally
soaked in it. But if the blotter had its way, none of the writing would remain" [GS, 1,
3, 1235]. The blotter can only blot theology, it cannot blot it out. It is, however, not
content to dry and thereby consolidate holy writ. Its ambition is to liquefy and
thereby liquidate it, to transform its canonic forms back into ink, leaving behind a
tabula rasa. It can, however, blot nothing without thereby absorbing it; and its
capacity for absorption has limits. Only a blotter more magical than Freud's "mystic
writing-pad," only an apparatus whose possibilities of self-evacuation matched its
62
diacritics/June 1978 63
diacritics/June 1978 65